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And the snow piles up

Snow Country Lane Book Cover Snow Country Lane
Tim McAndrews Prosecutor
Sarah Vail
mysteries, suspense, crime thriller
Archway
March 2, 2020
378

Tim McAndrews has been through a lot. Still a top prosecutor in Seattle, his near-perfect case record has been unjustly tarnished by a self-defense shooting. Because of it, he fears his career as an assistant district attorney is doomed to go nowhere. It's not all bad, though. Legendary FBI Profiler, Elias Cain has offered Tim a job with his team. As he weighs his options for the future, Tim is fortified by the fact that he saved his wife and lover, the beautiful Daniela St. Clair, from death. Tim takes a much-needed ski vacation with his wife and best friends to the Schweitzer Mountain Ski Resort. When a young girl is abducted in front of the resort, Tim is drawn into the intrigue. This girl isn't the only child in danger. Once the police finish their investigation, he will be assigned the prosecution's case where two six-year-old twin boys were abducted and murdered. Rainbow-colored duct tape Tim finds in the snow may be the one clue that ties these kidnappings together. Tim's vacation is put on hold when his friend, Elias Cain, negotiates with the Seattle DA to loan Tim to his profiling team for the kidnapping investigation. As their research unfolds, Tim and his friends realize that they are chasing down a child trafficking ring that's like an octopus with tentacles reaching everywhere. To take down this monster, Tim might have to put his life on the line-again.

When I started reading this book, I hadn’t realised that it was book 2 in a series about Tim McAndrew. But actually it didn’t matter. It stood alone well and the author drew out the character of Tim so that his background was well explained. And that of Daniela too.

In this novel the suspense is well carried forward. Just how many children have been abducted? and what for? Your suspicions are well founded when the twin boys are dropped off outside the hospital’s doors. But who is doing this? And why? And why doesn’t the profile, the FBI have drawn up seem to apply?

Profiling is an art as well as a science it seems and Tim understands both even though he hasn’t yet been formally trained and his emotions are well expressed.

I was invested in the kidnappings and the chases and whether the children would be safe and whether Tim would catch his man. The writing was concise and well expressed and kept you wondering. As the reader you knew of some of the story that Tim didn’t but not enough to guess who the real villains were – but I did have suspicions which proved correct.

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Lost?

Little Boy Lost
DCI Anna Tate
JP Carter
General Fiction (Adult) , Mystery & Thrillers
Avon,

Innocence is no protection against evil… One early October afternoon, ten-year-old Jacob Rossi begins the short walk home from school. But he never makes it. Days later, DCI Anna Tate is called to the scene of a burning building, where an awful discovery has been made. A body has been found, and the label in his school blazer reads: J. Rossi. As Anna starts digging, she soon learns that a lot of people had grudges against the boy’s father. But would any of them go so far as to take his son? And is the boy’s abductor closer than she thinks? An absolutely gripping thriller for fans of Cara Hunter’s No Way Out and First Blood by Angela Marsons.

A very disturbing story. very well told and believable after previous London riots.
My husband has always pointed to the regular occurrence of riots in the UK's history, and the fact that social ills were addressed afterwards, as a reason, possibly, that unlike  most of Europe, we still have a monarchy. And have not had a real Revolution.
 I saw a play created from interviews with our last London rioters, and it is clear that a significant portion of our youth feel very disenfranchised. And the increase in knife crime in 2019 emphasises this.
So the social unrest that is The background to this story is a viable a believable extrapolation.
I am not sure if Chloe's back story added a great deal apart from muddling stories up. I would have left it out. Its riot experience was enough.
And the final twist was one I never saw coming. Excellent.

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The Heat

The Burning Men Book Cover The Burning Men
DI ALEX FINN AND DC MATTIE PAULSEN. #1
Will Shindler
Noir Crime, Heist Crime, Serial Killers
Hodder and Stoughton
February 6, 2020
368

THE FIRST IN A PHENOMENAL NEW PROCEDURAL SERIES FEATURING DI ALEX FINN AND DC MATTIE PAULSEN. Perfect for fans of Mark Billingham, Peter James and Peter Robinson. When a high-rise development in South London catches fire mid-construction, a close-knit team of fire fighters tackle the blaze. The building should be empty, but they find a man, unconscious, next to several cases of money. The fire crew make a fateful decision; leave the man, take the money, quit the service and never speak of this again. But five years later one of them is set alight in the toilets at his own wedding. Soon after, a second is found in the burnt out remains of his Maserati, nothing but a smoking corpse. It appears that someone knows what they did. And there are still three firemen left to go. . . DI Alex Finn and DC Mattie Paulsen are an unlikely pairing, but they need to discover who is behind these killings before the last man burns. This is first in Will Shindler's Finn and Paulsen series - a British detective series that ranks with Mark Billingham, M.J. Arlidge, Staurt Macbride.

A definite 5 star read. With a great twist on the final page.

A well written, well plotted story that makes you wonder what would you have done? If you were the firemen, in that fire, and you had personal problems? And how would you have rationalised it? We do take our firemen and first responders for granted and forget just how dangerous their work is and how little they are rewarded in the scheme of things.

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When social ills abound

Little Boy Lost Book Cover Little Boy Lost
by J. P. Carter
General Fiction (Adult) , Mystery & Thrillers
Avon Books UK
Pub Date 23 Jan 2020

Innocence is no protection against evil… One early October afternoon, ten-year-old Jacob Rossi begins the short walk home from school. But he never makes it. Days later, DCI Anna Tate is called to the scene of a burning building, where an awful discovery has been made. A body has been found, and the label in his school blazer reads: J. Rossi. As Anna starts digging, she soon learns that a lot of people had grudges against the boy’s father. But would any of them go so far as to take his son? And is the boy’s abductor closer than she thinks?

A very disturbing story. very well told and believable after previous London riots.
My husband has always pointed to the regular occurrence of riots in the UK's history, and the fact that social ills were addressed afterwards, as a reason, possibly, that unlike  most of Europe, we still have a monarchy. And have not had a real Revolution.
 I saw a play created from interviews with our last London rioters, and it is clear that a significant portion of our youth feel very disenfranchised. And the increase in knife crime in 2019 emphasises this.
So the social unrest that is the background to this story is a viable a believable extrapolation.
I am not sure if Chloe's back story added a great deal apart from muddling stories up. I would have left it out. Its riot experience was enough.
And the final twist was one I never saw coming. Excellent.

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Murder by deviousness

The Body in the Snow Book Cover The Body in the Snow
DCI Craig Gillard Crime Thrillers Book 4
Nick Louth
Fiction, crime, suspense,
Canelo
January 31, 2020

Money, success, family? All deadly... The new unputdownable DCI Gillard thriller. A young detective is out for a jog on a snowy winter morning. Then she sees something terrible: a murder in the park, sudden and inexplicable. A woman has been killed by a passing hooded cyclist. It’s just DCI Craig Gillard’s luck that he’s on duty. The body is that of Tanvi Roy, one of the richest women in Britain and matriarch of a food empire. With a tangled web of family and business contacts and jealousies, Gillard’s job just got even more complex. As he delves deeper into the Roy family, it’s clear that everything is not as it seems. As the investigation threatens to unravel, Gillard realises it's only the beginning of his problems. Trouble of a different sort is brewing close to home... Perfect for readers of D.K. Hood, Patricia Gibney and Mark Billingham, The Body in the Snow is a remarkable and gripping crime thriller.

This is good solid British crime writing from a reliable author who thinks up devious plots and believable characters.

Always a good read.

This book also brought up 2 very interesting snippets – the first in location 2619, which is 54% of the way through, is a conversation between a mother and her very precocious 11 year old daughter. The second is better and most women will love this one. Location 2911. A discussion on ‘wrinkled bits’ left over from universe building and what happened to them!

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